Rubber Ducky Resort & Campground – A family campground located in Warren, near Winnipeg, Manitoba

Just look at how much the trees have grown

Site 43

Ok maybe we had some trees moved in. They started moving some in yesterday and will be continuing today. There will be around 11 or so new trees to help improve the north area of the campground. It definately seems to make the sites look a little less barren, especially along the west side where the other trees hadn’t filled out too much.

In amongst the trees in the picture we have plans to build a camping cabin. We are undecided if we will start this fall or not until the spring, but it will be ready for next season anyway. It will be a rustic one room cabin with a front deck area. Inside will be a double bed, bunk beds, table and most likely a bar fridge. There will be electricity but not running water (there will be a tap outside). Outside there will be a firepit and picnic table the same as any other campsite. These type of cabins are popular at the KOA’s in the US and I am thinking that it should be popular here. If they go over well we will look at putting more into our next phase.

Tonight we will be going to the Interlake Tourism Association’s celebration of stars evening. Fortunately it is in Teulon this year since in the past we have had to go to Fisher Branch and Riverton to attend a couple events. The evening is an awards dinner and we are nominated for some type of award. We will find out which one later tonight I guess.

My second assistant manager officially started Kindergarten today; Dennis is in Winnipeg doing IPC stuff; and I am all alone. It is soooo very quiet and I am getting sooooo much done without anyone else here. I have spent the morning catching up on paperwork that I haven’t had time to do lately.

Finally it looks like the sun is going to come out and I see quite a bit of blue sky on the way.

Did I fall asleep and wake up in October because it certainly seems like it outside. Yesterday afternoon we were checking the weather and it was going to be sunny and 17 today. So how come this morning it was only going to be 13 with showers?? Why do I even bother looking at the weather forecast.

This past weekend the weather was definately not very cooperative for camping. Of course it didn’t stop the kids from making good use of the pool. They didn’t seem to care if it was a little cool and rainy. We didn’t much for overnight campers – only about 3 sites. We still have our 4 pay as you go campers and a few seasonals were out so at least there were bodies around. Our seasonal appreciation went pretty good. We had tons of food as per usual – fish, french fries, pork on a bun, hot dogs, garden fresh tomatoes and dessert. We opened up the supper to non seasonal campers and so ended up with just over 30 people (and luckily not a whole lot of leftovers).  The rain showed up just as we were finishing so, we had to move the food tables inside for the last half hour or so.

We also had a good turnout for Bingo in the evening. What else can you do on a rainy cool evening but play a little ducky bingo?? We learned that apparently truckers are easily confused by bingo. But the kids enjoyed themselves and got right into things. The wins were split up pretty good amongst everyone this time. The slushee coupons were flying around on Sunday morning.

All in all it was a very busy last big weekend of the season. The pig roast was a huge success with approx 125 adults and 25 kids. Saturday night ended up being a karaoke night. One of the campers has his own system and offered to set it up and run it. Sunday afternoon the rec building was full of Bomber fans and I think I even saw a rider fan. I had to correct a huge oversight on my part as I had originally scheduled Bingo at 4pm, then was reminded that the game was on. So Bingo was changed to 6pm instead. We had about 10 people or so come out for that. Just a nice number for us to learn what we were doing. I learned a couple things and will be more organized for next weekend. One of our seasonals cleaned up by winning all but one game. Of course we had to point out that she had 3 times as many cards as anyone else. Their luck spilled over to the BBQ draw as their site was the lucky winner. (The dog actually won).

No surprise that on a cold, rainy Monday everyone cleared out pretty early. As they were all heading out however we had 3 pay as you go campers pull in. We even have one pay as you go tenter.

I set up a new calendar on the events page of our website. Hopefully this will be a little easier to read than how it was before.

Hard to believe that school starts tomorrow. It seems like the summer weather just started then it was done already. With any luck this yucky weather will just be a blip and there will be more summer to come.

It has been a very quiet week leading up to another busy long weekend. Things are starting to pick up today with a few sites coming in for an extra long weekend. Hopefully Mr Weatherman has got all the rain and cool weather out of his system. Today has certainly turned out to be a nice afternoon. Except for a couple tenting sites we are full for this weekend. There has been the usual cancellations and rebooks, but fortunately I have been able to get rid of all the sites that have come up. We have one last family reunion here this weekend as well. Saturday evening will be the usual Sept long pig roast and Sunday will be our first try at Bingo. The bingo will be a bit of trial and error at first to figure out how much to charge, how much the payout will be and how many games to play. I kind of have some ideas in my head, but I will see how they work out on Sunday. The BBQ draw will also be on Sunday. Hopefully it will be like last year and most of the tickets will be sold this weekend because right now there haven’t been very many sold.

Those of you on my e-newsletter list should have gotten the Sept/Oct newsletter this week. The most important part is the pool will be open until mid September, and the hot tub will stay open until we close the campground on Oct 15. I will be trying to do something every weekend – bingo, movie night, maybe rock band, karaoke.

I heard some good reports on the fishing this week, apparently they were biting pretty good.  Guess they like the rain.

This morning at 8:00am we had a spray plane flying overhead. For those of us that were up already it was kind of neat to see because they are so low. For those that were still sleeping it was not so good.

I think that pretty much sums up the weather right now. I don’t think that it stopped raining last night (thu) and things are very black right now. At least it did cooperate for the fun day of swimming lessons. We gave the kids the choice if they wanted to go in the pool or not. The first two groups didn’t go in, but the last few did. The kids weren’t complaining about being cold so it must have been ok.  Of course they were back and forth between the pool and hot tub which helped.

I have had one site change their reservation from Fri to Sat and have had 6 sites cancel altogether. One site is deciding if he will stay tonight or not.

Here comes the rain and there goes the swimmers.

It is now Saturday morning and still rainy and cold. Craft time is supposed to start in about 15 minutes and I have a feeling there will only be my regular two crafters here. Ironically we are making sun visors, or maybe we will call them rain visors. The guys are just opening the pool right now, but noone is racing to jump in that is for sure. They are still calling for sunny and 28 by Monday, what a nutty place we live in.

I had some people come and put a deposit on one of the sites that we are converting from overnight to seasonal. I still have one more open right now and then there will be one open later. We are planning on moving in some larger spruce trees along the NorthEast corner. We don’t want to sell that site until the landcaping is done. The company that is moving them in gave us an estimate of late August or September, so it should be happening anytime.

There is one group that will like the wet conditions created by the rain. Today is the quad club members ride and BBQ. There should be lots of mud for them to play in today. I hope they enjoy it because I am not.

We had a few uninvited ‘guests’ here early Sunday morning. The majority of the campground was woken up at approx 4am by a couple quads tearing around the campground. A couple of our campers were out and chased them away the first time. Then, they decided to come back again. Dennis was out in our vehicle and drove around and into town where he found the muddy tire tracks leading right to a house on the edge of town by the high school. It was quite obvious which house these kids/young adults had come from. The RCMP were called when they first were seen in the campground. We now called them back and let them know that Dennis was there and had found them. Two more calls later to the RCMP, they showed up and basically said there was nothing they could do because they did not see them on the quads. Not only had these ‘kids’ (we believe they are actually in their 20’s) tore around the campground they headed back to town through two farmer’s crops, another house and the putting green at the Golf Course.  So, these people did all this damage and caused this havoc and are getting off with no consequences. Needless to say there were a lot of frustrated people around here yesterday. The kind of ironic thing is that Dennis is the chairperson of the South Interlake ATV Club and we are trying to promote responsible quadding. It is a long, uphill battle when we have to deal with stuff like this. It will definately be a topic at the quad meeting tomorrow. I don’t want to publish on here who the persons responsible were, but if you ask us or some of our campers we will gladly tell you in private.

On a much better note our ice cream social turned out amazing on Sat afternoon. I didn’t get an actual count but we went through over two gallons of ice cream and the rec building was full. I was a little nervous about the turnout, since there was no one around just before. Everyone was apparently hiding in the shade and air conditioning until it was time for ice cream. It is nice to see that summer weather is finally here. The 30 degree temps are supposed to continue all week.